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Sunday, September 10
Le Show must go on!

First, my inner nerd must point this out to the entire world - the Australian Panavision site has a video (both high and low quality Quicktime) which shows one of their High Definition, studio-quality Panavision Genesis professional video cameras being set up, right from taking the individual bits of kit out of their flight cases to the finished product. The footage is quickly intercut, there's no speaking or music, just pure sound effects of someone assembling the kit (and there's plenty of lovely closeups to focus on the detail). A part of me finds watching it quite a seedy thing to be doing - there's something slightly dirty about the whole affair, but it's such a cool camera (and such a cool video) I watched it at least ten times in a row when I first downloaded it.

Why am I harping on about the Genesis? It really is an absolutely amazing camera, shooting in true HD (TRUE, uncompressed 4:4:4 RGB 1080p, from 1fps to 60fps) and, most importantly, a Super 35mm sized recording area - so you can use standard Panavision lenses with it! (All previous HD cameras required different lenses, and many cinematographers and directors say that they had to adjust their way of working to accommodate for this, or tell stories of troubles they had) - this is why George Lucas switched from a previous model of Panavision HD camera to Sony cameras, and that's why Panavision went and finally created this camera for the industry.

Movies filmed with the Genesis include the recent Superman Returns, and the Black Eyed Peas have been recorded in concert with a multi-Genesis setup... The thing is astounding. Go check out the video: Setting Up The Genesis.

Ok, so now my inner nerd is dormant once more, I can continue... Amongst the few things I've been up to in the past few days, I've been:

  1. Looking for a new mobile phone to try and get when my current contract runs out

  2. Been generally schmoodling around the Interwebs.


So, having picked upon the HTC TyTn (otherwise known as the Orange SPV M3100, under their own branding conventions), I'm now going to have to pester O2 to give me a half decent phone so I can go sell that on eBay and THEN buy an unlocked M3100 from eBay, as O2 - the introducers of the XDA (and SPV / MPV, if you go become a customer on other networks) are now scaling back their XDA presence in the UK, citing not enough consumer demand. O2 Germany however has already had loads (and I mean LOADS) of XDAs rolled out to the market for a long while now, which annoys me greatly.

Aaaaaaanyway.

Some good sites I've found recently (or ones that simply amuse me): a chap called Christopher Wood (no, not me, which is why I find it funny most likely) was interviewed on mi6.co.uk the other week, and as it turns out he wrote the screenplays for two Bond films (The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker) - and wrote a book about his experiences. What's even funnier is that earlier, before his Bond work, he was the author of Confessions of a Window Cleaner (if you don't know what that is, well... It's absolutely hilarious, go Google for it).

I also finally decided to check out Harry Shearer's web site, the guy who played Derek Smalls in This Is Spinal Tap (YES, HIM!) and now, not content with voicing about 80 kazillion (well, 22) characters on The Simpsons, also does a weekly radio show named, most enticingly, Le Show - anybody who appreciates a sharp wit and quality comedy should definitely sign up to receive updates when his latest show is made available (for free!) on the web. He broadcasts from LA on KCRW, and his show also airs across a fair amount of radio stations across the USA - unfortunately, I can't pick any of those up (only a few thousand miles too far to the right), but I can still listen online. I was spurred on to check his site out after listening to him on a BBC Radio 4 show called Miles Apart, and he dropped his site into the conversation. Well worth a visit if you like your comedy sharp, topical and hugely entertaining.


Off to eat some food now, more coming soon.



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Dragged out of Christopher's memory and pasted
into his blog at 9/10/2006 06:03:00 PM. Roughly.
Blog ID: 115790788711079286·
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